The Tongaririo Crossing

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The Tongaririo crossing is suposed to be New Zealand's best one day walk and it was v impressive. I took 140 photos... maybe it didn't warrant quite that many but it was really beautiful. ...Don't worry I won't quite put all of them up here!
We stayed at National Park, a tiny village near the park. The main/only reason, people stay there is to go walking or to ski in winter and the place really felt like a ski lodge, especially when we had to get up early to start the walk and it was still dark and a bit chilly..

The crossing walk is a one way track and so we got dropped off at the start at 7:30am and collected from the other end at 4:30pm. The main track is supposed to take between 7 and 8 hours so we did that and a little hour and a half side trip up to the summit of Mt Tongairiro.
The park consisits of three mountains, well volcanoes. One of which, Mt Ruaphe, is one of the biggest ski resorts in New Zealand in winter, hence all the villages around are really geared up for that. Mt Nugaruhoe is the highest mountain and was used as Mt Doom in Lord of the Rings, you can climb to the top of it but it is quite dangerous and a really hard climb, it looked vvv steep!
The crossing walk passes between Mt Ngauruhoe and Mt Tongariro and passes a few craters and lakes. The walk is really popular, I have no idea how many must have been doing it on the same day as us, but we passed a lot.. of people, there must have been a few hundred/thousand doing it.

Anita and I were actually quite suprised by how ok we felt the next day and so we went on another 2 hour walk before getting our buses, and I also had a little go on the climbing wall in the hostel. Maybe I did regret that slightly the next day though as the aching did start to set in...

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